In the Pleasure Groove: Love, Death, and Duran Duran

by John Taylor

  Miss Milo had indeed been a Fellini muse and starred in 8½. Miss Milo, who barely spoke English, seemed to have been held suspended in the thrall of her character in that movie, which she had filmed over twenty years before.

  The lady we were introduced to on the half-shell was no mere actress. “I am the great star, the muse of the greatest, Signor Fellini,” she managed.

  “Ah, yes,” we murmured. “We love Fellini.”

  “I was his greatest star.” She echoed Sunset Boulevard, stretching like a cat and reaching out her head on an impossibly long neck, out toward the horizon.

  “It’s so beautiful out here,” said I, in a dumb attempt at conversation. She merely struck poses as the cameras flashed, the photographers hypnotized by her, proud of the homegrown grandeur that she exhibited against the relative plaintiveness of these young British upstarts. What did we know!

  I wish I had appreciated her message at the time. Nick got it, but I laughed the whole episode off. I can see now how it is possible to get fixated on some moment, some past performance, how one can get stuck but also feel safe, living and functioning only in a nostalgic reverie, when your career highlights happen before your thirtieth birthday. The temptation to return and remain, frozen in lost time, is powerful.

  • • •

  The tour opened on May 28 in Palermo, the concert nicely timed to coincide with some high-profile Mafia trials that were going on there. Off the plane, we were herded into an armored police bus and set off for the hotel, where we were to wait out the afternoon before going to the venue shortly before showtime. We were accompanied by a half-dozen motorcycle outriders and a handful of police cars, all flashing lights and honking horns. God forbid a farm truck or a bicycle race should get in our way. Above us hovered a police helicopter, the noise terrific. No chances were being taken with our boney white asses!

  The van we were in could not have been less comfortable. As we rattled along, bouncing up and down at the mercy of Sicilian potholes, we held on for dear life, teeth clenched, both petrified and highly amused. It was certainly exhilarating.

  “A View to a Kill” made a great show opener on the Strange Behaviour tour, followed by “Notorious.” We played both “Election Day” and “Some Like It Hot,” honoring both the side projects that had been so divisive three years earlier. “Skin Trade” was a winner on that tour and, of course, we played all the big guns from the first three albums, beefed up with a three-piece horn section and a three-part backing-vocal section. We would record the vibe of the show with a live “bootleg” release recorded in Holland, Duran Go Dutch. It felt as though we were winning and could recapture whatever it was that might have been lost.

  The clenched teeth remained set for the next few days. In Bari, the concert had become a symbol of the struggle between the incumbent and incoming local governments, who were fighting for control of the locality. The concert had been called off by one bureaucrat, restored by another, off again, and then finally reinstated by the mayor of Bari himself, succumbing to the demands of his daughter, who insisted the concert would go ahead, in the city’s 40,000-seat soccer stadium.

  The mayor’s only caveat was that no ticket holders were to be allowed onto the pitch. This meant, with our stage set up at one end of the ground, the fans had to stand a long way from the action, behind the opposite goal. We would be playing to an empty stretch of grass. It was a Sunday, and it began raining torrentially at midday.

  By showtime, the fans were in their places, happy, singing and chanting despite the absurd efforts of their local representatives to ruin their experience entirely. And the empty soccer field was getting filled too, by every police officer and carabiniere in the province—uniformed, locked, and loaded, their girlfriends on their unarmed arms barely able to contain their excitement and sense of entitlement.

  Ronnie Wood arrived backstage. “What the hell are you doing here?” We were so happy to see his smiling face. “What a scene you’ve got going on out there,” he said, pulling a face. “Not very nice.”

  Woody was moonlighting with an Italian TV company and was there to interview us. Another surreal lesson in the possibilities ahead for us. “Don’t give up your day job, Woody!” Thankfully, he didn’t. We hoped he might join us for a watery “Miss You,” but the rain and intimidation sent him back to Rome.

  The longer the show ground on, the more excited did the WAGs get, and the more frustrated and fierce their old men became. I purposely backed off, as did SLB, from our usual repertoire of teasy moves. I thought for sure something was about to go off; they were surfing apoplectic out there, eyes popping out of their heads. Thank God for the rain, which does have a habit of dampening the most violent of spirits. We played the shortest encore of the year, which was a shame for the crowd, who, despite having the worst sightlines of the tour, never lost their enthusiasm, and then we got the hell out of Dodge.

  In Florence, we played the Stadio Comunale, a cool slab of art deco architecture.

  I relate this next story with my head low in shame. On arrival at the Florence hotel, I spotted a delightful eighteenth-century banquette with typically Florentine candy-striped cushioning that I thought would fit perfectly in the lobby of my London house. I decided to try my luck and see just how much power my fame had here. I approached the hotel manager. “Would it be possible to buy the chair?” I asked, slyly. “It’s so beautiful.”

  “Signor Taylor,” my hotel manager and new friend beamed, “it would be our honor for you to take a small part of our humble hotel back to your home in London. Where should we have it delivered?”

  The fame thing wasn’t all downhill. My delicate ego was satisfied, for now.

  Milan was the best show of the year. Fifty thousand happy hooligans in a June heat wave. They had to be hosed down every ten minutes and loved it.

  And Italy has never stopped gifting us. We have had some of our best times there. If you aren’t in the mood for the fuss and nonsense, it can be a real drag. And who is in the mood for that always? Even bass players have off days. But while international fame faltered, we found a new friend in Italy, who went a long way to convincing us that we were every bit as valid as a threesome as we had been as a quintet.

  We had a future.

  60 Chasing the Wave

  Outside Italy, however, there would not be a second hit on the Notorious album, and it was getting hard to dodge the sense that music had moved on, leaving me behind. The wave—the zeitgeist—that I had been riding my entire career, from before “Planet Earth” through to the summer of 1985, seemed to be over there now. I was not surfing it any longer. Instead, I was swimming as hard as I could, trying to catch it.

  With our next album, Big Thing, and the tour that would accompany it, I felt this even more; the empty seats and relative lack of interest from the media really started to hit home.

  There is one bona fide hit on that album, “I Don’t Want Your Love,” which reached number 14 in the UK and number 4 in the US (as well as being number 1 in Italy for six weeks, thank you!).

  But it felt like a follower.

  By the end of that tour in April ’89, things, far from going to plan, seemed to be getting worse. We were not making up ground, we were not getting closer to the wave; if anything, it felt to me we were getting dragged further away from it.

  Expectations were a big part of the problem. With the enormous sales of the first four albums, plus The Power Station and Arcadia’s So Red the Rose—both platinum albums in their own right—everything we touched had turned a very satisfying shade of yellow.

  But now the Midas touch seemed to have deserted us.

  I started to think that we needed to do an about-face, that Duran Duran had to go back to being a quintet, not a trio. As much as we had pushed the boat out with Notorious, presenting to the world the all-new Simon-Nick-and-John three-headed Duran, it didn’t seem to me as if it was working. And most importantly, the three of us could not just walk out onto a stage and play a song as a trio. W
e always needed augmentation.

  It was looking as if Warren Cuccurullo would be coming on board as the full-time guitar player. But what about a drummer? It was one thing to be augmented by a horn section or by a couple of backup singers, but to be augmented by a drummer? The drummer should be full-time.

  The drummer playing on the Big Thing tour was Sterling Campbell, a kid from New York who had stepped in at the last minute when Steve Ferrone went to work with Eric Clapton. Could Sterling be the fifth band member? I thought so. As the tour wound down, I went to work on him.

  I told him I wanted him to be a part of the songwriting process, that we needed to find a way back to the way we had worked before, that I believed we were becoming too reliant on computers and drum machines. I thought I knew what was needed to fix Duran, that if we could just get back to our previous style of writing and recording—five guys in a room jamming, exchanging musical ideas, fighting, firing energy off each other—then everything would fall back into place.

  Sterling was an up-and-comer, a talented musician who had graduated from LaGuardia High School, the “Fame” Academy on New York’s Upper West Side, where you had to be gifted to survive. He agreed to come on board as a full-time band member, and as a deal sweetener, I offered to let him move in with me, in my house in Ennismore.

  Bad idea.

  There was plenty of space there now, for in an utterly perverse act of self-sabotage, I had broken up with Renée, telling her I needed to be single again.

  It wasn’t because I wanted to return to the field of play, but rather because I had become obsessed with the idea that Duran’s success, and my particular appeal, had been down to female fans perceiving me as single and available.

  Renée had been ready to have a baby. She was broody. She had covered the fridge door with children’s names. I pretended not to notice. All I could think about was how to get the damned band back on top.

  Simon and Nick both had considerable emotional investments in family; they both had wives and children who naturally occupied their time and thoughts. I didn’t. I could only think of myself as “John from Duran Duran”; my net worth as a person was determined entirely by what the band’s net worth was. And it was going down.

  So I could not get my mind on baby-making or family-making; it was solely focused on “How do we get this band back to the top of the charts?”

  I became terrified that she would get pregnant. I projected disastrous futures for Renée and me in that eventuality: the inevitable divorce, Renée moving back to Denmark, the kid raised in Denmark—because I obviously couldn’t raise a kid—where he would speak Danish as his principal language.

  How horrible would that be? I’d go and visit the two of them and they’d just be talking about me in Danish together behind my back and I wouldn’t know what they were saying.

  Paranoia the destroyer.

  I took a lot of long baths and escaped into books. I was reading The Lives of John Lennon by Albert Goldman. John had always been one of my totems, but this book was a day-by-day analysis of John’s life, and the myth was totally unable to bear up to that scrutiny. Any magic that you might have felt about Lennon the writer, the performer, and the legend was gone, and sitting in the bath one day, reading it, I threw the book down on the floor and just broke down crying.

  I was crying for John, but also for myself.

  What chance did I have?

  Getting the band back together clearly hadn’t been the mental panacea I had hoped for. There was just too much wrong with me. I was so addicted to so many things—to fame, booze, cars, drugs.

  And a sense of doom was ever present.

  I was depressed for the first time in my life. I still felt the world revolved around me, but I also felt like a piece of shit.

  I was yet to understand that it takes more than a career to make a life. I genuinely believed that if I could just concentrate on music-making, I could play my way through.

  61 Tabloid Fodder

  Moving Renée out and Sterling in was a disaster from Day One.

  The last thing I needed to be doing was giving over my home life to a kid from New York who was just getting going. I needed to take it easy, start having a few nights in, learn my way around the TV remote. But dude here, he wants to party! He wants to sit up all night playing the rough mixes, analyzing the snare sounds!

  And he wants to run the band too. He is telling me exactly what Simon should be doing, what Nick should be doing. He can’t help himself. That’s how much energy he has, and it is all being funneled through me.

  I quickly realized I had made a catastrophic mistake.

  So what did I do? I drank over it. Got high over it. Tried to obliterate it.

  The writing sessions for the new album, which we would call Liberty, mostly took place at Stanbridge Farm in Sussex. MTV sent a film crew to document our work there.

  We could not believe who we met working with their crew, Les McKeown, the singer of the Bay City Rollers.

  We would see Les again, riding the front seat of a London bus one afternoon, from the privileged position of our tour coach, as we drove north on Edgware Road to a concert in Birmingham. What cosmic trick had been played on the lead Roller to bring him to this place?

  There but for the grace of God went I.

  • • •

  EMI approached us saying that the time was right to release a greatest hits album, which they proposed to call Decade. Apparently, “tests” had shown it could sell several million copies around the world, and as they were careful to point out, the last couple of albums hadn’t really been doing the business.

  None of us really wanted to consider a retrospective release. We were in the process of trying to reinvent ourselves, always writing new material, but we weren’t really in a position to argue with EMI either.

  We were at least able to take creative control of the project. We brought in clothing designer Stephen Sprouse to create the cover and had fun building a “Decadance” remix, using elements from many of the hits for a track we called “Burning the Ground.” The album was in the stores for Christmas 1989, and the three of us went to New York to promote it.

  Simon and I were doing an interview with CNN at the Capitol Records office building. The cameras were set up in the boardroom, and on the wall facing us there was an Absolut Vodka ad, a poster on the wall that blended the Capitol Records Tower in Los Angeles with the Absolut bottle. It said Absolut Conviction. As the CNN interview started rolling, I totally tuned out, focusing all my attention on this poster on the wall.

  The interview started. “Simon, John, this is your greatest hits album and it’s time to look back over an extraordinary career. What are some of the highlights for you, John?”

  I swear I could not think of one highlight. I couldn’t think of one positive thing that had happened over the past ten years. I was reduced to monosyllables. For so many years I’d been so glib. I could turn it on in interviews so easily, do them standing on my head.

  And now? Nothing. I didn’t want to look back on the last ten years; there was too much confusion.

  Get me out of this room, get me out of this town, and get me back home.

  Anywhere but here.

  • • •

  But before we left town, the universe had another trick up its sleeve. I was getting out of our car to go into a radio station on Broadway, in among those Midtown glass towers, when a film crew and a journalist with a rather sad-looking girl in tow pounced on me before I even had a chance to put both feet on the sidewalk.

  “John, do you know this girl? Do you know this girl? She says she’s having your baby.”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  Simon and Nick hustled me into the lobby of the building, leaving the guy behind calling after me, “John! John! She’s having your baby! Would you like to comment?”

  I didn’t know what the hell this was about, and I had no recognition of the quiet, supposedly pregnant girl standing in the shadows, b
ut there had been so many episodes over the last six or seven years that I couldn’t help but worry. Was there something to it?

  The girl had taken her story to The People, a trashy British Sunday tabloid, saying, “I’m having John Taylor’s baby. He and I are really close and we’re going to be married. Look at the photographs.”

  Apparently the parents got on the phone and substantiated it; they said I’d been to their home for Sunday lunch.

  The truth of it came out over time. The girl had completely invented the story. She had altered the photographs to make it look like we were together.

  I will never know what the parents’ story was. The People, in classic tabloid fashion, turned it around, with the headline, DURAN STAR VICTIM OF PATERNITY HOAX. They took all of their responsibility out of it and still got a story.

  As the drama of the paternity hoax was unfolding, I was grateful to have the support of a new girlfriend, Amanda de Cadenet, one of the most media-savvy individuals I have ever known.

  Aged nineteen, Amanda was already infamous for being a wild child. She had been to Princess Anne’s private boarding school Benenden, and her father, Alain, had been a successful race car driver. Amanda’s infamy began the day her dad contacted a friend of his at Scotland Yard and arranged an intervention to have Amanda arrested and taken from the home of some dubious individual she had moved in with. The story was a tabloid sensation.

  Seeing a picture of her at a gallery opening, I thought to myself, “This is exactly who I need in my life!”

  We met at a play Julie Anne Rhodes was starring in at an alternative theater on the King’s Road in Chelsea. Amanda had blond hair and blue eyes, and looked like an angel. That night, she was wearing a red riding jacket. Tally-ho! It should have been a warning to run a mile, but later on, over dinner after the show, Nick said to me, “I like Amanda, I like the way her mind works.” “Right,” I thought. “Exactly. I like the way her mind works. . . .”